RE: ASSA and Many-Worlds
Jason Resch writes: Stathis Papaioannou wrote: What about when multiple equally valid OM's exist? I don't agree that they are all perceived. If I am to be duplicated and one of the copies tortured, I am worried, because this is subjectively equivalent to expecting torture with 1/2 probability. Post-duplication, I can only experience being one of the copies, and if I am not the one who is tortured, I am relieved, although I feel sorry for the other copy in the same way I might feel sory about anyone else who is suffering (maybe a bit more, given our shared past). This is no more than a description of how our psychology as beings who feel themselves to be embedded in linear time works. Arguments that this does not reflect the reality of the situation, that it does not make sense to consider I might become either copy prior to the duplication but only one copy after the duplication, do not change the way my brain forces me to feel about it. Lee Corbin on this list has argued that I should consider both copies as selves at all times, and perhaps we would evolve to think this way in a world where duplication was commonplace, but our brains aren't wired that way at present. In saying you disagree that duplicate OM's perspectives are perceived, I take it that you mean their collective divergent experiences are not integrated in a consistent memory, not that they would be non-conscious zombies. If this was your point, I agree. That's what I meant. However, I see a difference of opinion in how we understand the probabilities. Whereas you say prior to the duplication and torture, one has a 1/2 probability of being tortured and 1/2 probability of being spared, I see it as one having a 100% probability of being tortured AND a 100% probability of being spared, as both experiences occur with 100% certainty. The probability that an observer-moment sampled from both perspectives post-duplication will remember being tortured would be 1/2. OK, but I am looking at it from the perspective of going into the replicator. Suppose you were offered either the above choice - you are duplicated and one of the copies will be tortured - or a biased coin will be tosed and you will have a 51% chance of being tortured and a 49% chance of being spared. From a selfish perspective, it would be best to go for the duplication, because since you can only experience being one person at a time, you can expect to come out of the duplicator with a 50% chance of being tortured as opposed to the 51% chance in the case of the coin toss. Our brains may not be wired for experiencing total empathy for others who are suffering, but this is a result of evolutionary psychology. Perhaps a species whose brains were wired this way would be maximally moral, as they would be intolerant to any suffering and would operate at great risk to themselves to aid other individuals. Sure, we are only contigently wired to consider our own future selfish interests. It is possible to conceive of other evolutionary paths where, for example, we regard our kin as selves in the way social insects seem to do, or we regard future and past selves as other and live selfishly for the moment. There is nothing irrational about either of these positions, because the relationship betwen the observer moments is a contingent fact of evolution. Stathis Papaioannou _ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Rép : The Meaning of Life
Le 18-janv.-07, à 06:38, Brent Meeker a écrit : Bruno Marchal wrote: To avoid to much posts in your mail box, I send all my comments in this post, Hi Brent, 1a) Brent meeker wrote (quoting Jim Heldberg) : Atheism is not a religion, just as a vacant lot is not a type of building, and health is not a form of sickness. Atheism is not a religion. --- Jim Heldberg It seems to me that Jim Heldberg confuse the scientist (indeed) attitude of agnosticism and atheism. Let D = the proposition God exists, ~ = NOT, B = believes. An agnostic is someone for which the proposition ~BD is true. (And ~B~D could be true as well) An atheist is someone for which B~D is true. But what does true mean? Does it mean provable? and on what basis? Does it mean our best guess I am using true in its usual informal sense here. To be more precise here would be a 1004 fallacy. In the technical part, all proposition are purely arithmetical, and if you want you can defined that notion of arithmetical truth in set theory for example. But the Tarski definition of truth is enough in the present context. The proposition P intended by the sentence A is true when it is the case that A. The atheist is a believer. As John M often says, an atheist already has some notion of God such as to be able to believe it does not exist. Now most atheist are already believer in believing religiously in Primary Matter (a metaphysical entity). I'am agnostic in both sense. I do not believe in God, nor do I believe in Matter. Those terms are not enough well defined. I do neither believe in the inexistence of God, nor in the inexistence of Matter. I wait for more data. Right. God exists is not well enough defined to believe or disbelieve - both God and exists being ill defined. But I think theism is well enough defined. Theism is the belief in an immortal, supernaturally powerful person, who is concerned with the welfare and behavior of human beings. I believe this god of theism does not exist. As to other gods, such as the god of deism or pantheism, I'm agnostic - I don't believe they exist and I don't believe they don't exist. In all the above believe means my considered opinion - not something mathematically provable, but something I think is provable in the legal sense of preponderance of the evidence or in the scientific sense of in accordance with our best model. OK, but here you do the inverse of the 1004-fallacy. I was thinking we were already more precise than that. There is a problem of vocabulary. You continue to use the word God as related to our particular history. I just defined theology of a machine by the truth about that machine (whatver that truth is). Given that I limit myself to self-referentially correct machine, the provable sentences by the machine are included in the truth about the machine. The inclusion has to be proper due to incompleteness of all such machines. Unlike the christian theologians, I have no (not yet) evidence that God (truth, the ONE, ...) is dedicated to the welfare of man (although I have evidence that man, or at least some man, are dedicated too the serach of truth. Also, nobody has proved the existence of a primitive physical universe. With the present definition of theology, the belief in a physical primitive universe *is* a theological proposition. And I have shown that such a belief is epistemologically incompatible with the belief in comp (that there is a level where I am Turing emulable). The Mechanist position in the philosophy of mind is just (epistemologically) incompatible with, not the belief in a physical universe, but with the belief in the primary nature of that physical universe. So atheism is not a religion - it's the belief that a particular class of religion is mistaken. To reject a belief that is contrary to the evidence is not a matter of faith. It doesn't take faith to believe there is no Santa Claus. It does not take faith to NOT believe in Santa Klaus. It does take faith (if only in your own consistency) to believe that you will never believe in Santa Klaus. Now I (re) define locally and in a first approximation GOD as the ultimate reality, for which I do have evidence. Thanks to Plotinus and Augustin there is case that this notion of GOD is closer to the christian notion than a primitive physical universe, for which I have no evidence at all (beyond the usual extrapolation of self-consistency that all higher mammal seems to do all the time). I am closer to the atheist when I say that the GOD is not a person (or is a zero-person). But with comp, I have to abandon materialism, even in the weak sense that there is a primary notion of matter. Materialism, for a computationalist (who has understand the complete UDA) is a form of vitalism: it invokes something nobody can verify, and which (by UDA) is shown to explain absolutely nothing. Like the
Re: Hello all - My Theory of Everything
Le 11-janv.-07, à 15:15, Russell Standish a écrit : I would further hypothesise that all intelligences must arise evolutionarily. I do believe this too, but once an intelligence is there it can be copied in short time. Dishonest people do that with ideas, publishers do that with writtings, Nature does this with DNA, and fanatics can do this with nuclear bombs. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Rép : The Meaning of Life
Bruno Marchal writes: 1c) Brent wrote (to Stathis): How is this infinite regress avoided in our world? By consciousness not representing the rest of the world. That is an interesting idea. You could elaborate a bit perhaps? I do agree with your most of your recent replies to Stathis about the question does a rock think?. But perhaps not entirely for the same reason as you. We will see. It's a half-baked idea, so I'm not sure I can fill it out. But it is similar to Stathis's point that language (and all symbolic representation) must be grounded in ostentive definition. In Stathis example the conscious computer is conscious by virtue of reference to a real world - which has now been replaced by a simulator. But in a closed system, with no outside reference, the ostensive definition itself must be represented computationally. And in what sense is it a representation of an ostensive definition? Only in virtue of some meta-dictionary that defines it as such in terms of still other representations. When you ask your computer to print a document, the computer typically does not search the meaning of the words print or document in a dictionary. Other more subtile self-reference are handled by the diagonalization technic which makes it possible to cut the infinite regresses. IF and when I come back on the Fi and Wi, I will give you Kleene second recursion theorem which solves all those infinite regress appearing in computer self-reference. An association has been made between print and document with objects in the real world. You can work out what the print command is on an unknown computer by experimenting with different inputs and observing outputs. But if the real world is internalised, even if you could work out regularities in the syntax of an unknown computer (and I don't know if this is necessarily possible: it might be a military computer with syntax deliberately scrambled with a one-time pad) you would be unable to work out what it originally meant - what the computer is thinking. It is like finding an unknown language without a Rosetta stone or any cultural background which might help you with a translation. This reminds me of the impossibility of sharing 1st person experience: you can only do so if you share some 3rd person quality allowing at least some interaction. Stathis Papaioannou _ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: Rép : The Meaning of Life
Bruno Marchal writes: Le 18-janv.-07, à 04:10, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : I would say relative to a theory explaining the appearances, not just to the appearances. Well, it is relative to appearance, but people go on to theorise that these appearances are true reality. From Pythagoras to Proclus, intellectuals were proud not making that error. Aristotle is in part responsible for having made appearance reality, coming back to the (provably wrong assuming comp) common sense in those matters. (of course as you know we have to rely on common sense to go beyond common sense). OK, but we have to start with some basic observation. It looks like objects are pulled to the Earth by a force - that is a basic observation, with a minimal implicit theory. General Relativity explains this differently, but it takes a rather complex series of arguments to arrive at GR. You can't call Newton stupid because of this. Similarly, your conclusion that there is no separate physical reality follows from a number of carefully argued steps, and at the start of the chain is the fact that there does appear to be a physical world... if there did not, we would not be having this or any other discussion. Searle's theory is that consciousness is a result of actual brain activity, not Turing emulable. No... True: Searle's theory is that consciousness is a result of brain activity, but nowhere does Searle pretend that brain is not turing emulable. He just implicitly assume there is a notion of actuality that no simulation can render, but does not address the question of emulability. Then Searle is known for confusing level of description (this I can make much more precise with the Fi and Wi, or with the very important difference between computability (emulability) and provability. Searle seems to accept that CT implies the brain is Turing emulable, but he does not believe that such an emulation would capture consciousness any more than a simulation of a thunderstorm will make you wet. Thus, a computer that could pass the Turing Test would be a zombie. See here for example: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/searle.comp.html This theory is in keeping with the facts Ah? At least, it isn't contradicted by any empirical facts, although neither is comp. and allows us to keep materialism as well. Abandoning the comp hyp. OK. Searle is not a computationalist - does not believe in strong AI - but he does believe in weak AI. Penrose does not believe in weak AI either. The main problem I see with it is that it allows for the existence of philosophical zombies, such as computers that act conscious but aren't. If this were possible it would mean that consciousness was an optional evolutionary development, i.e. we could all have evolved to live in a world exactly like our own, except we would be zombies. It's not a knock-down argument, but it strikes me as odd that something as elaborate as consciousness could have evolved with no real benefit. OK. Of course COMP admits local zombie. One day it will be possible to build an artificial museum tourist, looking and commenting picture and art like a real tourist, which nobody will be able to distinguish from a real tourist, but which will be only a sophisticated machine looking for presence of bomb in the museum. With comp, consciousness has a big role, many big role (relative sped-up of computations, give the ability to face personal relative ignorance and alternate reality guessing and contemplation, ...). Cf I define in first approximation consciousness as the quale which accompanies the instinctive believe in reality/self-consistency. I agree there is no way to know whether you are being run in serial, parallel, etc. But mathematically multiple shorter parallel streams have to be able to be glued, at least mathematically, for constituting a proper computation. If not literally anything can be described as a computation. That is why I explicitly use a mathematical definition of computation, and then(and only then) try to figure out what is a rock, for example. Would you speculate that there is some indivisible atom of conscious computation? Not at all. Consciousness, or instinctive belief in a reality (or in oneself) and/or its associated first person quale needs an infinity (even non countable) of computational histories. It depends in fine of all nameable and unameable relations between number. Nothing deep here, the primeness of 17 is also dependent in some logical way of the whole mutilicative structure of the natural numbers. Machine are lucky to be able to prove the primeness of 17 in a finite time, because the *truth* of even something as mundane than 17's primeness already escapes the machine capability of expression. You seemed to be disputing the idea that a serial computation
